Category: WordPress
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One Word: Worth a Thousand Pictures
Does anyone else feel oppressed by the “tyranny of pictures”? I do, and I’m fighting back with a new series of posts about words I love. Words that interest, fascinate, and delight me; words that (for me) carry depths of meaning mere pictures can’t duplicate. One article per word — posted ᴡɪᴛʜᴏᴜᴛ ᴘɪᴄᴛᴜʀᴇs. Here’s why…
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Lubuntu: Linux Even Leaner!
Recently I wrote that desktop Linux is now a practical alternative to Windows. Especially Windows XP, for which Microsoft has discontinued support and security updates. I based this suggestion on my delightful experience with Ubuntu Linux — the most popular of many Linux variants. (It has so many because it’s open-source freeware. Anyone can customize…
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Format Text on tsū? Here’s How!
Text formatting on tsū, the new social network that pays for submissions, may at first seem impossible. It isn’t! Oh, tsū still doesn’t have the rich formatting options of Google Plus. (No bold or italic for example.) You can’t even divide your text into paragraphs, as you can on Facebook. Yet. I say “still” and “yet” because tsū is…
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Google Plus: Track Posts and Comments
You’ve written a wildly popular post on Google Plus. People are talking. Lots of reshares, including some by social-media heavyweights whose followers greatly outnumber yours. You shared it first, perhaps, as a link to your blog, with a terse summary. You shared it again as a standalone article, with a great cover photo. Again with a…
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More Fancy Fonts and Special Characters
Brighten your social-media posts with fancy fonts and special characters! Like this: ℱᗩﬡᙅᎩ ℱOﬡ☂ᔕ and ϟ℘ℯ¢ḯαł ℭнαґα¢☂εґṧ. As ever-more publishing migrates to social platforms like Facebook and Google Plus, the apparent lack of formatting options becomes confining indeed. On Facebook we have essentially none. Google Plus users are lucky: There we at least have boldface, italic, and…
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Google Comments Unleashed
What’s the most important new resource for bloggers and web designers, now that link images appear full-width on Google Plus? Most articles focus on increased website traffic, since these highly visible images click through to their target links. That’s indeed important. Even more important, however, in my view, is the fresh incentive this gives to…
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Fifty Years of Fasting
I almost didn’t notice! This year (2014) is the fiftieth year I’ve participated in the annual 19-day Fast for members of the Baha’i Faith. The milestone nearly slipped past me. The Fast spans March 2-20, and it was just yesterday — the 16th — that I did the math and realized it’s now fifty years.…
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Google Plus displaying full-width link images
The Google Plus social network apparently has just begun displaying link images as full-width photographs — not simply as thumbnails. [UPDATE: From Saturday, March 15 through Monday, March 17 — the Ides of March through Saint Patrick’s Day — Google Plus links reverted to the old-style thumbnail images. As of today, March 18, they are…
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Make Your Own Animated GIFs
Animated GIF files are the rage these days. You know, those digital photos that contain moving objects and people, not unlike the hung pictures at Hogwarts in the Harry Potter books. Here’s an example: My niece, Bella Tanguay, making her first-ever horizontal dive. She already was doing straight-down vertical dives, headfirst, but needed coaxing from…
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Insert Special Characters
Back in the typewriter age, we knew how to add “special characters” such as exotic punctuation marks: Press a key along the top row for “$” or “%” etc. More common ones, like periods and commas, were among the main keys. Now with computers, we have Unicode characters, HTML characters, extended ASCII characters — more…
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Boomer Proves You Need Your Own Website
Still not sure you need your own website, under your own name? Boomer the Dog proves you do! Before we get to Boomer, here’s a wrap-up of what I’ve been saying about owning your own name: Like it or not, you have a public image. It’s an image magnified many times over by the Internet.…